Future Horizons for Data Portability Research

Delara Derakhshani is Director of Policy at the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), a non-profit with the mission to empower individuals by enabling effective data transfers. Chris Riley is Executive Director of the Data Transfer Initiative and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.  Shutterstock The European Union’s landmark tech competition law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is in force. Its goal is to ensure fair and open digital markets, which it accomplishes by imposing obligations on certain large platforms (or “gatekeepers”) which must proactively implement the DMA’s requirements. The European Commission recently designated six gatekeepers–Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft–which have until March 2024 to comply with the DMA’s provisions for their relevant services, including a new data portability obligation. Article 6(9) of the DMA introduces a new data portability obligation:  The gatekeeper shall provide end users and third parties authorised by an end user, at their request and free of charge, with effective portability of data provided by the end user or generated through the activity of the end user in the context of the use of the relevant core platform service, including by providing, free of charge, tools to facilitate the effective exercise of such data portability, and including by the provision of continuous and real-time access to such data.  In the broader context of the DMA, the spirit of this obligation is clear: to create an equitable internet ecosystem where gatekeepers cannot impose unfair conditions on others or abuse their dominant…Future Horizons for Data Portability Research